1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to computer component migration and more particularly to systems and methods which employ multiple image combination to analyze and enable migration.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many enterprises perform data-center transformations, consolidations, and migrations to reduce costs and make information technology (IT) greener. This includes server virtualization, server migrations to clouds, and server migrations between data centers. Classically, migration concentrates on individual servers in a source infrastructure, and migrates server content to other physical servers or new virtual images. For example, classically one may migrate to a newer or larger server model from the same model series as before, migrate to a server from a different model series or vendor, migrate to a newer or different operating system or perform a physical-to-virtual conversion of a source system. In such migrations, compatibility and costs associated with changes only have to be considered between the source systems and target hardware, hypervisors or operating systems. Other classic migration types are software upgrades or changes. In such migrations, compatibility and costs associated with changes only have to be considered between one piece of software and a related piece of software.
The increasing cost of IT management, compared with hardware cost and application development, has led to new types of infrastructures called clouds. Clouds gain a lot of their benefits from strong standardization, which simplifies management and thus reduces costs and errors. Many clouds, in particular those called platform-as-a-service clouds, offer virtual images that can easily be deployed onto physical machines.
An offering is a catalogue of images from which users can choose, and actual images according to the catalogue descriptions are available in an image library and can quickly be copied to a real server and started there. Some of these virtual images contain not only an operating system, but also certain software components that are already installed. This permits faster deployment if an image with such software is needed, and yields more standardized installations.